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this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2026
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Lashing out at me was unnecessary. I was pointing out that there are 2 catastrophic vulnerabilities that are guaranteed to be present in every chip that meets your criteria.
I'm not defending the IME or the PSP. The most generous thing I can say about them is that they are unnecessary. I'm pointing out that the chips that you want to use have been unsupported for so long that they have catastrophic vulnerabilities that have never even been attempted to be patched. There are more catastrophic vulnerabilities than just Spectre and Meltdown.
It was an attack on your bullshit. Not on you personally.
And I was pointing out that you are wrong.
You are advocating for chips that are /more/ vulnerable, not less. You are advocating for chips with a much larger attack surface which brings copious unknown vulns. Overall, you are giving poor advice from an infosec standpoint. It is easier to secure a simple known thing than a complex unknown thing.
I’m listening.
No, you weren't. You were being pedantic. AMD will have Spectre. Intel will have Spectre and Meltdown. 2 vulnerabilities.
No, I wasn't. Stop putting words in my mouth. Unless you know how to write microcode, I have serious doubts that you are capable of successfully patching the vulnerabilities on those chips.
Do whatever you want. I don't care.
If you don’t like the facts, what more is there to say? The facts failed to support your claims. If you will not let the facts shape your world view, then it’s on you to go off and find different facts.
Advocating for only running “supported” chips is inherently contempt for old hardware. (But note you said that apparently without knowing about the 15h.org project).
How are you still failing grasp this? The fix was made. And it was done in the kernel without writing microcode. You’ve been told this already. You did not counter it yet to still failed to absorb it. And now you try recycling defeated arguments. You don’t even have to patch Meltdown on chips unaffected by Meltdown (AMD). The spychip failed to protect from both Meltdown and Spectre.
Patching is not the only way to control for a vuln. I am not going to give you the whole infosec discipline here in this thread. There are many ways to controlling for a vuln apart from patching. Depending on your threat model and use cases, there may be no need to do any control. The 15h.org project is another kind of control. Air gapping is another. Detecting the malicious code is another.
You act like you're the only one that understands information security. I took a security class for my computer science degree too. Productive conversation cannot be had when you strut around arrogantly dismissing everyone that disagrees with you.
Spectre was a microcode patch. Meltdown was a kernel patch, so in firmware. Only AMD bothered to fix chips that fit within your timeframe. The fix has not been made for the chips you want to use.
You aren't going to stop branch prediction with clever tricks. These are hardware level flaws. Patching is the only way to completely mitigate these flaws.
What’s being dismissed is irrelevant facts. You continue (for a 3rd time) to still fail to grasp the fact that Meltdown was not found to affect AMD chips. It’s wholly irrelevant.
Those are two different things. There was a firmware patch. And separately there was a kernel mitigation. You don’t need both.
You mean AMD’s f/w patch was not made. Yet you’ve been told about the 15h.org project. If you absorbed that, then citation needed that Coreboot fails to mitigate. In the absence of Coreboot, the os mitigation was implemented in linux. So you’re pushing a bullshit problem.
I'm aware of coreboot. I was not aware that the project managed to increase support to include configurations for all chips that predate IME and PSP. Last I recall when I looked at coreboot, there were chips that they didn't think could ever be supported, even without nannyware. I wasn't pushing a bullshit problem, I was raising legitimate concerns for problems that I didn't know had solutions. If you don't want people to raise honest, good faith concerns to you then you better be extremely vigilant that you don't step in shit.